Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#401

Post by baron_harkonnen » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

> Paul Graham is indirectly talking about

I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing.

I would find PG's recent stream of ego driven rants much more enjoyable and potentially insightful if he would just say what he's really trying to say.

He might be trying to add strength to his arguments by making them somehow more general, but since these pieces always seem very clearly about a specific bone PG has to pick, the result is they read as some of the most cowardly essays I've ever encountered.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#402

Post by drclau » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

qshaman wrote: post #328

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he is just hustling his audience And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they loose.

In today's startup and VC ecosystem, they've already won. They don't have to ever become profitable, they just need to get money from their friends and connections, forever.

I don't recall who said this (if anyone does, please do share!), but it goes something like this: if you reach Series F, it means exactly what you think it means. Well, not anymore. It won't be long until we'll exhaust the alphabet for funding series names, and we'll go two letters.

And this is not even a critique of PG. It's just what the VC and startup ecosystem seems to have become. If anything, YC does seem to be a sort of counterbalance to this trend.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#403

Post by Igelau » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #66

antipauline wrote: post #48

Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.

You actually add credibility to his writing because you make it obvious that you don't actually have a counter argument.

I recall "Dr. Gene Ray" defending the credibility of Time Cube on similar grounds. There wasn't enough of an idea presented to even have an argument about.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#404

Post by amznthrwaway » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

bttrfl wrote: post #323

Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work, but it was a nice coincidence. [0] mightyapp.com

I didn’t think there was anything crazy about Mighty.

It looks like a straightforward play to implement app streaming to deliver an application that holds immense amounts of personal data, and Mighty will (eventually) monetize that data.

It feels weird to bet on devices not being fast enough though, in a world where my phone is faster than my laptop.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#405

Post by citrusybread » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

hahaha, fuck, I remember ages ago, maybe 2013, when people were trying to get me to buy into the "web 2.0" craze -- "Web is the future!", "web can scale!", "nobody will install apps!", "your stuff will be accessible everywhere!"

funny how they all turned out to be mixed bags. the best part? people telling me web apps are "lighter". even back then I knew that was a hot load of bullshit.

good to know the other shoe has dropped and we're really going full-circle to thin clients/mainframes, but shittier.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#406

Post by aniforprez » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #330

mumblemumble wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "powerful". I'm rocking a 8 year old laptop. I also use NoScript, which means I'm pretty aware of what code webpages are actually running on my computer. What I've seen is that the things that make it really chug have very little to do with how much actual functionality the website has. Beautiful CSS animations usually aren't too bad, either, even on my old computer. The real performance hogs tend to be things…

> powerful I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant. In the non-multiomics world I also make browser based data visualization software (most recently worked on this, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer ). I want to load up 500GB and facet on multiple dimensions…

> I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant.

But why? Wouldn't you be better suited writing a native application that would do this better? This seems like you're building a problem for this solution. Most people use a browser for Gmail and to read news. Your example already works really well on the browser on my phone

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#407

Post by blocked_again » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

suhail wrote: post #270

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts his money where his mouth is.

> Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible.

Well if you fund 1000s of ideas, some of them are bound to be successfull. There is no surprise there. That's basic maths.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#408

Post by mcguire » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

"I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math, engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example, crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon. Perhaps no one could be."

Weird. Math, engineering, and the hard sciences are the few places where it is possible to positively say an idea won't work.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#409

Post by aranchelk » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

Taking this article at face value, the idea Graham is talking about, already has a name: jootsing (jumping out of the system) coined by Douglas Hofstadter. I’m familiar with it from Daniel Dennett’s excellent book Intuition Pumps.

A feature of ground breaking ideas is they contradict established wisdom, but that’s also a feature of most awful ones. The latter greatly outnumber the former. For every brilliant mind contradicting and redefining a discipline there are a multitude of clueless ones who lack basic knowledge of that discipline producing total crap. Think Einstein vs thousands of crackpots who don’t understand kinetic energy and momentum are not the same thing.

For this reason Dennett points out that the presence of jootsing is not a valuable metric to assess an idea. He goes on to say as it’s unhelpful advice to give to someone attempting to produce a valuable concept. He compares it to teaching someone how to invest by saying “buy low, sell high”. Yes this is a feature of a successful investor, but in and of itself, quite unhelpful.

Unfortunately, saying “my ideas jootses” isn’t saying much.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#410

Post by twobitshifter » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19

bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done. My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw the…

RE: 4.

My company uses webmarshal which fronts requests and blocks pages deemed not good for productivity/data security. In that type of situation you already have an intermediary so mighty could make sense - make everyone use mighty and give it a custom blocklist. Obviously not a situation that employees would be a fan of, but it’s something that corporate is already doing, and mighty could improve the experience.